Olympic update

The Daily Sail gets the latest news from the RYA's Olympic Manager Stephen Park

London 2012

Although a decade away still there is some potentially monumental news in a prospective bid for London to get the Olympic Games in 2012.

"The government are going to decide before Christmas about whether they are going to back it," says Park. "If they don’t back it it won’t happen and the BOA [the British Olympic Association] have said they won’t submit a bid without government support.
So that is all quite exciting. Last week all the key movers and shakers in British sport got together to have a look at the proposal and reviews on the 2012 plan and unanimously supported a British bid."

While the bid is for the Olympics to be held in east London much of the competition will take place outside of the capital. Sailing, for example, would be in Weymouth.

"I suppose the big issue if they do decide is will 'we get it or not?' and there are two other big cities in the running for it which are Paris and New York," says Park. Of these New York is the stronger of the two. There is also the prospect of the 2010 Winter Olympics being held in Vancouver in which case it is unlikely the 'summer' games following it would be held on the same continent - in theory good news for the London bid.

"From our point of view how much better could it get?" says Park, the enthusiasm beginning to bubble again. "Having the Olympics in your own backyard - the amount of money that would come into British sport would be fantastic. If you bear in mind that the BOA spent £1 million on the Gold Coast in terms of developing the holding camp [prior to the Sydney Games]. That was £1 million of British money that we took to the Gold Coast.

"If you think that there are 92 other countries that are going to come and set up holding camps somewhere in Britain. In sailing terms those people are going to be looking to base themselves in Weymouth as much as possible. So there’ll be a huge amount of money coming into Weymouth, but also in terms of other sporting facilities around the UK, that will have a lot of money to help develop the sporting facilities in Great Britain. So the big thing for us is there is the potential for having huge facility development and a huge legacy for British sport."

Tomorrow in part two of our inteview with him Park discusses the sailing potential within team GBR...